


Rereading Paradise Lost Through Good Omens

by PlaidAdder



Series: Good Omens Meta [4]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett, Paradise Lost - John Milton
Genre: M/M, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 07:34:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,986
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22363420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: After watching Good Omens, I re-read Milton's Paradise Lost. My thoughts about this follow, more or less as they were originally posted. Many of these thoughts were about whether Paradise Lost was the real source for some of the adaptation's representations of the angels and the war in heaven, especially re the Archangel @#$! Gabriel.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale & Gabriel (Good Omens)
Series: Good Omens Meta [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1457137
Comments: 2
Kudos: 32





	1. Books I-IV: Paradise Lost and the Archangel @$! Gabriel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gabriel's GO personality is utterly, grotesquely, hilariously inappropriate to the only tasks to which he was canonically assigned. But, of course, like Lucifer and Michael, Gabriel had an afterlife in song and story, so there are many other possible sources for his characterization in the GO adaptation. Milton’s Paradise Lost seems to me very likely one of them.

**AUGUST 2, 2019**

I’m enjoying book one, which is really the best part of _Paradise Lost_ , and am in the middle of the catalogue of other demons who got thrown into the lake of fire along with Satan and Beelzebub. Dagon is represented as a “sea monster, upward man/ And downward fish.” (I’ve been trying to figure out what Dagon’s signature animal is in Good OmensTV and I thought it was a vulture, but now I’m not sure.

Anyway, in Book One Milton lays out the following headcanons about angels & demons:

* The material they’re made out of is intrinsically immortal so they can’t be destroyed. 

* Angels & demons are really BIG. 

* Also:

> For Spirits when they please
> 
> Can either sex assume, or both; so oft
> 
> And uncompounded is their essence pure,
> 
> Not ty’d or managled with joint or limb,
> 
> Nor founded on the brittle strength of bones
> 
> Like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose,
> 
> Dilated or condens’d, bright or obscure,
> 
> Can execute their airy purposes,
> 
> And works of love or enmity fulfil.

**AUGUST 16, 2019**

So I have now reached Book IV. Satan has reached Eden, after traveling through Night and Chaos, getting Sin to open the gates of hell for him and then disguising himself as a cherub and getting Uriel to give him directions. We meet Adam and Eve.

This is the point where I have to kind of put the book down and walk away for a while and then go back to it. Milton is SOOOO concerned to establish Eve’s subordinate position, and it is just infuriating. But here is one thing I forgot: when Eve first achieves consciousness, the first thing she does is almost fall in love with a woman.

OK, granted, it’s actually her own reflection in a river, but there is not a lot of ambiguity about it. She is attracted at once by it’s “answering looks of sympathy and love,” and tells Adam that she would have just parked herself on the riverbank and “pin’d with vain desire” if the voice of God hadn’t literally told her to go fulfil her reproductive destiny:

> “What thou seest…fair Creature, is thyself;
> 
> With thee it comes and goes: but follow me,
> 
> and I will bring thee where no shadow stays
> 
> Thy coming and thy soft embraces, he
> 
> Whose image thou art; him thou shalt enjoy,
> 
> Inseparably thine, to him shalt bear
> 
> Multitudes like thyself, and thence be called
> 
> Mother of human race.” What could I do,
> 
> But follow straight, invisibly thus led?’

It’s a beautiful passage, and I kind of also want to punch it. Which sort of encapsulates a lot about my experience of reading Milton.

**AUGUST 18, 2019**

So much is given to us in the Good Omens adaptation about Aziraphale and Crowley that I find my fic-writing attention wandering to other things, including the question of how Gabriel got to be such an asshole. I just finished writing “[Laissez-Faire: A Debacle in Three Conversations,](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F20179423&t=MjM4NmZkNWVjNTg5YjZmOTRjZWExNDFiYTZhZmNjZTFmMzcyMWQ5YSw5UDUzS0xtcw%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=https%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187096610394%2Fparadise-lost-and-the-archangel-fcking-gabriel&m=1)” which is a partial answer to this question. Further ruminations follow.

In the Old Testament, when angels show up, they’re often not named; but Lucifer is mentioned by name in Isaiah 14 (btw this post is brought to you by the searchable bible texts at [www.biblegateway.com](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.biblegateway.com%2F&t=NjdjYTg2ZDBkNGQ0ZTEyMzJlMzIxOTE3NDg1YmZjZTdiY2M1MWEzNCw5UDUzS0xtcw%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=https%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187096610394%2Fparadise-lost-and-the-archangel-fcking-gabriel&m=1), which is actually quite a useful resource if you can ignore the ads) and Gabriel appears in the book of Daniel to interpret one of his visions for him. In the New Testament, there are a couple of references to the archangel Michael: he leads the battle against the dragon in Revelations 12, and is mentioned in the letter of Jude, which I had never even heard of. (The notes to my New Oxford Annotated Bible report that this was a reference to a Jewish tradition according to which Satan tried to deny Moses burial on the grounds that he was a murderer and Michael argued the case against, so I guess Michael is both a warrior and a lawyer. Anyway…)

New Testament Gabriel literally has one job: birth announcements. He appears only in the Gospel of Luke, and only twice. First, he announces the impending birth of John the Baptist. (Zechariah refuses to believe him because his wife Elizabeth is so old; Gabriel gets pissed off and says he will be unable to speak until the baby is born because he wouldn't believe what Gabriel told him, so you can enjoy imagining Jon Hamm doing that.) Gabriel's next job is to tell Mary that she is going to give birth to the Messiah. I tried to imagine the Gabriel of Good Omens doing that job, and [this happened](https://t.umblr.com/redirect?z=https%3A%2F%2Farchiveofourown.org%2Fworks%2F20124127&t=NTgwZTFmYThkY2FjNTkyMDlkNmJjNGQ5ZmU1YTBkYjAyYWU4MjkyYiw5UDUzS0xtcw%3D%3D&b=t%3AoLe-_8xUds1HV0x3kEwd_w&p=https%3A%2F%2Fplaidadder.tumblr.com%2Fpost%2F187096610394%2Fparadise-lost-and-the-archangel-fcking-gabriel&m=1). Gabriel's GO personality is utterly, grotesquely, hilariously inappropriate to the only tasks to which he was canonically assigned. 

But, of course, like Lucifer and Michael, Gabriel had an afterlife in song and story, so there are many other possible sources for his characterization in the GO adaptation. Milton’s _Paradise Lost_ seems to me very likely one of them. First of all, I imagine it’s difficult to get through a secondary education in England without having to read it, and second, Milton really extrapolated Isaiah 14 into a whole narrative of the War in Heaven which is obviously part of the Good Omens backstory. In _Paradise Lost_ , Uriel, who’s one of the angels in the Good Omens God Squad, is the angel appointed to watch over Earth and make sure nothing evil reaches it. The PL Uriel, btw, is an idiot; all Satan has to do to trick Uriel into showing him the way is disguise himself as a young angel and go up to Uriel and blink his big doey eyes and tell him he wants to go on a curiosity voyage so he can see this wondrous new creation and learn new ways of praising God, and Uriel gives him directions. However, Uriel does eventually discover his mistake, so while Satan is slinking about down on Earth, Uriel goes to get help from Gabriel. 

In _Paradise Lost_ , it appears that before the Fall, _Gabriel_ is the Angel of the Eastern Gate, which is described as “a rock/ Of alabaster, pil’d up to the clouds,’ conspicuous far, winding with one assent/ Accessible from earth, one entrance high.” Gabriel is sitting up there, “betwixt two pillars,” when Uriel comes to tell Gabriel about how he just let the fox into the henhouse. Gabriel is described as “Chief of th’angelic guards.” He’s surrounded by “the unarmed youth of heaven” who are playing “heroic games” on the celestial sward, and right next to a “celestial armoury” full of shields, helmets, and spears.

So basically, Gabriel is military, and he’s in charge of training as well as guarding. THAT role is a lot easier to reconcile with the Gabriel we know: it’s an important position, but it does not require imagination or compassion, and it would have gotten him used to giving orders and having them carried out immediately and without question. 

OK, so here’s the first thing Uriel says to Gabriel when he brings him the bad news in PL book IV: 

**“Gabriel, to thee thy course by lot hath given/ Charge and strict watch, that to this happy place/ No evil thing approach or enter in.”**

Uriel is about to tell Gabriel that he (Uriel) fucked up. But Uriel’s just a lookout/sentry/spy. Gabriel is the one who’s actually supposed to defend the perimeter and keep evil things out of Paradise. So before revealing his own mistake, Uriel reminds Gabriel that this is Gabriel’s responsibility too. Uriel, after all, only gave Satan directions. Gabriel is the one who should have stopped him from getting in. (Gabriel has actually been guarding that gate very effectively; Satan got into Eden anyway by flying over the wall, which shows you how effective giant walls are at keeping people out.) Gabriel’s immediate response to Uriel is to cover his ass:

**“Uriel, no wonder if they perfect sight,/ Amid the sun’s bright circle where thou sitt’st,/ See far and wide: in at this gate none pass/ The vigilance here plac’d, but such as come/ Well known from Heav’n; and since meridian hour/ No creature thence: if Spirit of other sort,/ So minded, have oe’rleap’d these earthy bounds/ On purpose, hard thou know’st it to exclude/ Spiritual substance with corporeal bar.”**

Or, in other words, “Hey, this is not MY fuck-up, my job is to guard this gate and I’m doing that PERFECTLY. Either your “perfect sight” is in fact faulty, or else this thing doesn’t have a corporeal form, and blocking creatures with ‘spiritual substance’ only is NOT MY DEPARTMENT.”

So, if we assume that the Good Omens Gabriel is more a descendant of the PL Gabriel than the Biblical Gabriel…then it becomes interesting that the job of guarding the Eastern Gate, in GO, is given not to this musclebound military hunk but to Aziraphale, whose characterization is in every way the opposite of this. It is also interesting to think of Gabriel as still maybe feeling responsible for the Fall and still feeling a need to shift responsibility for his own failures as chief of the angelic guard onto someone else’s shoulders. Someone like, say, Aziraphale.

Upon further reading I have (re) discovered that Gabriel and Satan have a big verbal confrontation during which Satan sasses him to his face, and then God won’t even let them fight. So he’s been wanting to punch Satan for 6000 years…

Oh, by the way: in Paradise Lost, angels eat food.

When Raphael comes to visit Adam and Eve in all his Technicolor six-winged glory (he’s a seraph), Adam and Eve put together a feast of Edenic delicacies for him (well, Eve does all the work, Of Course). Adam says, uh, I hope it doesn’t offend you that I’m offering you Gross Matter (not of course in those words), but we wanted to make you feel welcome. And Raphael spends quite a bit of time explaining that he does appreciate the gesture because angels eat just like humans and animals do. They take in coarser material and “refine” it via some digestive process into they celestial matter. He suggests that via this process, humans might one day actually convert their material bodies into this finer angelic substance in the same way…as long as they don’t listen to that nasty serpent and disobey God.

So who knows? Maybe the reason Gabriel is so pissed off all the time is that he’s on a diet.


	2. Books V-VI: Didn't You Have a Flaming Sword?: The War In Heaven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I have discovered over the years that a lot of the books that many of us read for the first time in high school or college are books that you actually need a lot more life experience to fully appreciate. In my youth, when I first became interested in _Paradise Lost_ (and in my young adulthood, when I first read it in college), my interest in the story kind of faded whenever Satan wasn’t the main character. Specifically, books 5-8, during which Raphael comes to Earth and tells Adam and Eve about goings-on in Heaven before the Creation, did not hold my attention well. Well, I can’t say how 7-8 will stand up to rereading at the age of 50, but I’ll say this about book VI: To me, the War in Heaven is, at this moment, both unexpectedly compelling…and acutely depressing. 
> 
> Join me behind the cut-tag as we investigate a question I don’t think Milton necessarily wanted us to ask, which is: Why did God give the angels weapons in the first place?

**AUGUST 24, 2019**

I have discovered over the years that a lot of the books that many of us read for the first time in high school or college are books that you actually need a lot more life experience to fully appreciate. In my youth, when I first became interested in _Paradise Lost_ (and in my young adulthood, when I first read it in college), my interest in the story kind of faded whenever Satan wasn’t the main character. Specifically, books 5-8, during which Raphael comes to Earth and tells Adam and Eve about goings-on in Heaven before the Creation, did not hold my attention well. Well, I can’t say how 7-8 will stand up to rereading at the age of 50, but I’ll say this about book VI: To me, the War in Heaven is, at this moment, both unexpectedly compelling…and acutely depressing. 

Join me behind the cut-tag as we investigate a question I don’t think Milton necessarily wanted us to ask, which is: Why did God give the angels weapons in the first place?

In Milton’s universe, angelic matter is undifferentiated; and for that reason, angels and demons can’t be permanently wounded. Michael gets a sword pretty deep into Satan on the first day of fighting, and it does force him to retreat. However,

> Yet soon he heal’d, for Spirits that live throughout
> 
> Vital in every part, not as frail man
> 
> In entrails, heart or head, liver or reins,
> 
> Cannot but by annihilating die;
> 
> Nor in their liquid texture mortal wound
> 
> Receive, no more than can the fluid air:
> 
> All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear,
> 
> All intellect, all sense; and as they please,
> 
> They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size,
> 
> Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare.

As so often happens in _Paradise Lost_ , Milton does something here that’s truly innovative…and then retreats to the shelter of existing conventions. Despite his insistence that angels and demons don’t have fixed forms and can take whatever shape they desire, in _Paradise Lost_ only the demons (Belial, primarily) ever adopt female forms, and all the angels have permanently chosen the forms of unusually large and supernaturally beautiful human men. In the story world, this can be explained by the fact that since God created both the Son and Adam in his own image, and they’re both human men, to adopt a human male form is to honor God by attempting to imitate Him. But by Milton’s own rules, the angels wouldn’t have to be limited to human form at all. Satan could heal from Michael’s wound by turning himself into a waterfall, or a three-headed squirrel, or a sperm whale. But I digress.

So. You’re John Milton. You’ve read the Iliad. You’ve read the Aeneid. You want your big epic battle with deeds of glory. And yet you have created two armies who can’t be wounded or killed, and who are so evenly matched that the only way to end the fighting is to turn the Son loose on the recreants in his universe-shaking rainbow-colored cherubim-driven eyeball-spangled thunder chariot. (I am not making any of that up, btw. That thing has wheels made of beryl which are “set with eyes,” and the whole thing is carried by cherubim with four faces and wings also “set with eyes,” and there’s a “crystalline” floor holding up a “sapphire throne, inlaid with pure/ amber, and colors of the show’ry arch,” the “showery arch” being a rainbow, and as he drives this thing into battle it belches out “smoke and bickering flame and sparkles dire.” What does it mean, I wonder, that the aesthetic that Milton once invented for Jesus’s “chariot of paternal Deity” has now perished from all parts of our cultural landscape except for cartoon shows marketed to girls 5-12, and Pride? But this is perhaps a question for another day.)

I resume.

Milton wants his epic battle, and he’s made himself two armies in which every soldier is both a perfect warrior and a brilliant general, and also immortal and only temporarily vulnerable. So how does he get his war narrative on? By escalating the violence. The longer both sides fight, the more destructive their methods become–not to each other, but to their environment.

And this is where it starts to seem both eerily predictive and acutely depressing. On the first day of fighting, it’s all hand-to-hand and everyone is wearing and using tech that would have been recognizable to Achilles and Hector: swords, spears, shields, helmets, body armor. Because this is all on a cosmic scale with angelic combatants, the materials are impossibly strong and hard and heavy. Satan’s got a shield made of “tenfold adamant.” ‘Adamant’ is an imaginary mineral imagined to be literally unbreakable and eventually becomes more or less synonymous with “diamond;” as an adjective, it’s still used to describe people who are intransigent or immovable. Michael’s sword is capable of going through large numbers of attackers at one stroke. Everything is pretty evenly matched, except for two things: one, the rebels feel pain when they’re wounded, whereas the angels don’t; and two, Michael’s sword turns out to be stronger than Satan’s shield. (The War in Heaven is totally Michael’s show, by the way. Gabriel is just a second- or third-in-command who does a few doughty deeds, the main one being the defeat of Moloch.) 

When the rebels retire in disorder after nightfall, “Nisroch, of Principalities the prime” points out that as long as their side is the only one that can feel pain, they’re doomed. Satan’s answer to this problem is to invent cannons. 

Milton’s readers were familiar with cannons, but Satan’s followers weren’t. To explain the concept, Satan reminds them that “the bright surface/ of this ethereous mould whereon we stand,/ this continent of spacious Heav’n, adorn’d/ with plant, fruit, flow’r ambrosial, gems, and gold” has dark roots in a space “Deep under ground” made up of “materials dark and crude/ of spiritous and fiery spume.” Milton imagines the invention of firearms with some very weird birth imagery: “These in their dark nativity the deep/ shall yield us pregnant with infernal flame;/ which into hollow engines long and round/ Thick-ramm’d, at th’other bore with touch of fire/ dilated and infuriate, shall send forth/ from far, with thund’ring noise, among our foes/ such implements of mischief, as shall dash/ to pieces, and o’erwhelm whatever stands/ adverse.” 

In _Paradise Lost_ , Satan often tries to appropriate God’s creative power, and always winds up unleashing some monstrous evil. This time, it’s gunpowder. Raphael is evidently so shaken by his own description of this development that he pauses to warn Adam that humans are quite capable of inventing this scourge on their own: “In future days, if malice should abound,/ Some one, intent on mischief, or inspir’d/ with devliish machination, might devise/ like instrument to plague the sons of men/ for sin, on war and mutual slaughter bent.”

Yeah, they might, Raphael. They might.

The next day, the rebels fire their cannons into the angelic host, and it’s terrifying. It creates complete disorder in a matter of seconds. However, like the supervillains they are, Satan and Belial waste some time gloating, during which the angels come up with an escalation of their own: they drop all their arms and take off all their body armor, fly up to the hills, and start tearing the hills up and throwing them at the rebels.

You read that right: they literally rip hills and mountains up by their roots and throw them down onto the cannons. This effectively stifles the cannons (and a lot of the rebels). However, the rebels immediately match the escalation, and now both sides are literally dismantling the landscape so that they can hit each other with it.

God at this point has to intervene, because if the angels are allowed to continue fighting, they will destroy Heaven. So that’s when the Son drives out in his thunder-chariot–which totally outclasses the pathetic demon cannons–and herds all the rebels into a group and then shoves them out through “the bounds/ And crystal wall of Heav’n,” where a gap opens up and they fall through Chaos into Hell. 

As ridiculous as the image of angels throwing hills at each other may be (the hills are alive…with the sound of conflict…), it’s just an image of the destination to which war always tends: utter environmental destruction. Milton never saw the poisoned, smoldering battlefields of World War I, but you don’t need to be Agnes Nutter to extrapolate them from the wars that Milton did know about. (In the angels flying out to the hills and then dropping things on the enemy cannons from a great height, Milton even sort of imagines the role of the air force in trench warfare.) Through Raphael, Milton is willing to deplore modern warfare as a catastrophe which both sides foolishly think of as a zero-sum game, but which in fact is simply an orgy of destruction in which everyone and everything would eventually be lost, but for the grace of God. 

But that’s only once the demons start digging up the “bright surface” of Heaven. Up to that point, when everyone’s limited to spears and swords and hand to hand combat, Milton seems to be having a great time. And this raises the question:

Why are all these angels armed to the teeth in the first place?

We’re told that there wasn’t any evil in the universe until Lucifer got jealous of the Son and tried to usurp God’s throne. Mostly what the angels spend their time on, before that happens, is praising God and doing a little light maintenance. Chaos and Hell do exist, but Heaven seems pretty secure. What does Lucifer need a tenfold adamantine shield for? Why is there an armoury in Heaven? Why are all the pretty clothes and pretty toys available to the angels either armor or weapons? Why did God prepare them for battle before there was an enemy?

Now, since Milton’s God is all knowing and all seeing and has also foreseen everything, the simple answer is that he’s preparing them for the war in Heaven. But that doesn’t really explain anything. You would think that if you knew there was going to be a major battle in Heaven that you would eventually have to resolve yourself, and you didn’t want Heaven to be destroyed by it, you wouldn’t give them all that hardware. If you wanted to limit the damage in advance, you wouldn’t arm them at all. 

Unless, of course, the whole point of creating angels in the first place was to build yourself an army. Unless getting your war on was pretty much central to your original Ineffable Plan. 

All right. I lured everyone in here by promising that this was relevant to Good Omens. Well, I guess in my mind, if you imagine that Aziraphale and Crowley have both been through all of this, certain things become more complicated. For instance, the flaming sword. In Genesis, it doesn’t make its appearance until after the Fall, and its purpose is to keep _humans_ out of the Garden. In Paradise Lost, however, Gabriel’s guarding the Eastern gate with all the shields, helmets, spears, etc. that eh can stuff into the armoury. Why’s he still using all that outdated tech? He knows now that the Other Side has better weapons. Maybe the drilling and the games and the shields and spears and so on comfort him somehow. Maybe they help him avoid remembering that he just lived through his own apocalyptic event, and learned from it that none of his skills or strength or weapons enabled him to actually save his own world. 

Meanwhile, in Good Omens, Aziraphale is sent to the Eastern Gate with a flaming sword–and gives it away as soon as he can do it. He thinks he’s helping them defend themselves against wild beasts, etc. But maybe the sword isn’t really a gift. Maybe he’s just trying to get rid of it, and everything it reminds him of. In the process, he inadvertently curses humanity with the scourge he now knows enough to hate.

Meanwhile, in the scene where Aziraphale gets dragged back to heaven and Anderson from Sherlock is yelling at him about losing his equipment, the costuming is based on First World War uniforms and helmets. As the nuclear threat unfolding below keeps reminding everyone, the angels are still fighting the last war, clinging to a conception of combat which has long been superseded by new kinds of explosions. Gabriel and Michael still want war and love war and refuse to be talked out of war. They’re replicating, on earth, a process that’s already failed in Heaven, hoping that this time they can win. 

Whatever Gabriel, Michael, and Uriel were meant to learn from the War in Heaven, they haven’t. Any more than we learn from our own wars. They’re not going to win. They’re just going to destroy another world. They can’t see that. It makes them ridiculous; and also tragic. 

PS: This is my new headcanon for why Aziraphale hates _The Sound of Music_ so much.


	3. Book VIII: Raphael Explains Angelic Sex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Don’t any of you feel bad about your A/C fic, because when it comes to angelic sex, John Milton was there way ahead of you. 

**AUGUST 24, 2019**

So in book VIII of Paradise Lost, Raphael, “the sociable archangel,” is having a chat with Adam about this and that, and when they start talking astronomy Eve gets up to go do some stuff in the garden, because she only likes to hear about sciency things from Adam, who can make them sexy when he retells them to her (yeah I’m paraphrasing but not by much). Once Eve is gone, of course, the conversation turns to other things, and Adam opens up about his fears regarding his “passion” for Eve. Raphael gives him some seasonable advice..and then Adam asks him, 

> “To love thou blam’st me not, for love thou say’st
> 
> Leads up to Heav’n, is both the way and guide:
> 
> Bear with me then, if lawful what I ask;
> 
> Love not the heavenly Spirits, and how their love
> 
> Express they, by looks only, or do they mix
> 
> Irradiance, virtual or immediate touch?”

This makes Raphael blush. Like, who knows how, since as we’ve established angelic matter is undifferentiated and they don’t really have a circulatory system, but he responds with “a smile that glow’d/ celestial rosy red, love’s proper hue.” 

I’m gonna quote Raphael’s answer to this question in full.

> “Let it suffice thee that thou know’st
> 
> Us happy, and without love no happiness.
> 
> Whatever pure thou in the body enjoyst
> 
> (And pure thou wert created) we enjoy
> 
> In eminence, and obstacle find none
> 
> Of membrane, joint, or limb, exclusive bars;
> 
> Easier than air with air, if Spirits embrace,
> 
> Total they mix, union of pure with pure
> 
> Desiring; nor restrained conveyance need
> 
> As flesh to mix with flesh, or soul with soul.”

And then basically he says oh my goodness, look at the time, I really must be going. No, truly, that is what he says:

> “But I can now no more; the parting sun
> 
> Beyond the earth’s green Cape and verdant Isles
> 
> Hesperian sets, my signal to depart.”

All right. I know there are fan theories out there about Crowley having been the archangel Raphael before the fall. I don’t know where they come from or how they took hold. But…this conversation right here. Does this sound like Crowley to you? Cause it sounds more like Aziraphale to me. 

At any rate, friends, don’t any of you feel bad about your A/C fic, because when it comes to angelic sex, John Milton was there way ahead of you. 


	4. Books IX-XII: Goodbye To All That

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is just to say that I have completed my reread of Paradise Lost, and it made me genuinely sad. 

**AUGUST 27, 2019**

Part of the pleasure I’ve been getting out of rereading Paradise Lost has to do with the edition I’ve been using. For someone for whom literature is this important, I don’t really do the Book As Beloved Object thing much. Most of the books that encumber my living space are either very old and beat-up or new paperbacks. But a long time ago, my parents gave me this 1802 edition of _Paradise Lost._ As far as I can tell, it is in no way rare or remarkable. It was published by “J. Johnson &c” with engravings designed by E. F. Burney and engraved by Landseer & Neagle. But it’s a nice book to handle. The leather cover is very smooth. The paper is not in great condition, but it’s not brittle, and it feels good to turn the pages, stiff as they are. 

The art, I have to say, is hilarious. Here we see Eve being tempted by a serpent whose head…well, I can’t decide whether it looks more like a duck or a hand puppet. This is a particularly egregious example; but none of it lives up to the poem. If _Good Omens_ reawakened a whole cluster of associated themes that led me back to _Paradise Lost_ , what kept me reading it was a poetic language that is nothing like what appears in most of the things I now read, and which I have evidently been missing, without realizing it. Hell is so richly imagined, with its lakes of fire and its darkness visible; but so is heaven, and so is Eden. I’d forgotten how much I loved words like “empyrean” and “amarant.” (Yes, WOFsters, that’s where the name Amranth comes from; also the mramtha flowers, which are blue and grow on vines.) You can look up what “empyrean” means, but it doesn’t help; it’s just a way of referring to “the highest and most exalted sphere of heaven” or the sky more generally. What I imagine when you read it is based entirely on the music it makes, and it’s something I can’t describe. 

Anyway. This is just to say that I have completed my reread of Paradise Lost, and it made me genuinely sad. 

Angry too, of course, because I can see all the ways in which this story has been manipulated and then there’s the endemic sexism. But this time I actually felt some grief over the loss of Eden, which is not something that happened to me when I read it years ago. I suppose it has to do with the passing-away, right now, of the Earth I once knew. Eve’s desperation when she hears they’re going to be banished is about the only thing about her characterization that I can connect with. It’s Michael who breaks the news, and not especially gently. She’s devastated–for herself, but also for the flowers she’s been tending in Paradise, which she realizes won’t grow anywhere else. Of course, neither Michael nor Adam has a lot of time for her grief. But I feel it.

This part of the poem doesn’t have much to offer in terms of Good Omens headcanons, apart from the fact that when Satan returns in triumph to Hell after tempting Eve, right after he gives his big victory speech, his whole audience turns into snakes. And then he does. They all snake around hissing together in panic, and then eventually they resume their true form. It’s evidently part of their divine punishment.

Leaving Milton is kind of like that, I guess. It’s a beautiful world, beautiful language, not at the end of the day a place I can live in. It wasn’t built for me, and I can’t really spend much time there. But I can visit it once in a while.


End file.
